Veteran investigative reporter Bob Woodward said this week the internet would not be of much use in a case like Watergate, the story he helped break in 1972. But he misses the point about the value of using a multitude of sources instead of just one.

Woodward, who has been a reporter and editor at the Washington Post since 1971, was reunited with his investigative sidekick Carl Bernstein earlier this week at a meeting of the American Society of News Editors, as part of a panel at the conference entitled “Watergate 4.0: How Would the Story Unfold in the Digital Age?” Woodward’s view seemed to be that younger newspaper reporters and journalism students have a misplaced faith in the power of the internet, and that what really counts (not surprising perhaps) is good old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting and personal interviews.

Journalism needs more than just shoe leather now

The veteran reporter and author of multiple award-winning books said that a Yale journalism class was recently asked how Watergate would be covered now, and that the responses caused him to almost “have an aneurysm” because they said they would just use the internet to find out information about President Richard Nixon’s secret campaign fund. Woodward said that this betrayed a view of the internet as being a kind of “magic lantern” that would reveal everything — and that the students were also wrong when they said that the blogosphere would have helped bring Nixon down:

I have attempted to apply some corrective information to them, but the basic point is: The truth of what goes on is not on the Internet. [The Internet] can supplement. It can help advance. But the truth resides with people. Human sources.

Woodward is right, of course. The truth does reside with people — people like Mark Felt, the so-called “Deep Throat” source who leaked all of the relevant information that allowed the Watergate reporters to build their case. And obviously, if you happen to have a senior member of the FBI leaking you damning information about the president, that is going to provide a lot of bang for your reporting buck. Would Felt have had a Facebook account? Probably not, as Woodward took pains to point out during his panel (and has pointed out before). And he likely wouldn’t have been on Twitter either, or had a Tumblr blog.

The lone reporter is no longer the only source of news

But that doesn’t mean the Woodward-and-Bernstein approach is the only one that produces anything of value, or that the internet is only good for “supplementing” things, or commentary after the fact on political blogs, as Woodward seemed to suggest. Something like the release of the Collateral Murder video, for example — a classified clip of a Iraq war incident that Wikileaks released in 2010 — arguably couldn’t have happened without the internet, which helped make the connection between Wikileaks and Bradley Manning, the former U.S. army intelligence analyst who (allegedly) leaked the video.

The point is not that individual effort and the labor involved in long-term investigative piece isn’t worth anything any more. It is, of course, and people who do it well are extremely valuable — including veteran reporter Seymour Hersh, who revealed recently that the U.S. government has been secretly training MEK fighters from Iran at a base in Nevada. But Woodward (not surprisingly, perhaps) still seems to see journalism as something that lone-cowboy style reporters do in secret by themselves, rather than a collaborative process that now involves other people — including the “people formerly known as the audience,” as journalism professor Jay Rosen likes to call them.

That view may be a lot more romantic, and it serves the purposes of journalists who see themselves as a special breed, with special powers that normal mortals don’t possess — and it serves the purposes of newspapers and other traditional media entities, who would like to be the sole source of all value in the media ecosystem. But it doesn’t really serve the purposes of journalism or society as a whole.